Obits where dead women tell their tales

Getty, AP, Netflix

Ida B. Wells (left), Henrietta Lacks, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Plath were all featured in the New York Times' new "Overlooked" obituaries, which pay tribute to the lives of women whose deaths were not originally covered in the newspaper's obits pages.

Ida B. Wells (left), Henrietta Lacks, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Plath were all featured in the New York Times' new "Overlooked" obituaries, which pay tribute to the lives of women whose deaths were not originally covered in the newspaper's obits pages. (Getty, AP, Netflix)

On Wednesday, Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, was making history in Sacramento when she took over as California Senate president pro tempore and became the first woman and first openly gay Senate leader in the state’s history.

On Friday, such notable locals as psychologist, author and Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger; Angel Faces founder and People magazine Hero of the Week Lesia Cartelli; and San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan will be among the speakers at the San Diego Women’s Week Leadership Conference at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center.

Then there are the national and international voices of groundbreaking women who are now speaking to us from the great beyond. Better late than not at all.

They are the women of the New York Times’ “Overlooked” project, which is attempting to make up for many decades of historical and journalistic neglect by publishing belated obituaries of groundbreaking women whose deaths were not marked in the 167-year-old newspaper’s obit pages.

The list of the overlooked is long and infuriating. It includes such renowned figures as “Jane Eyre” author Charlotte Brontë, pivotal women of color such as journalist Ida B. Wells, and trailblazers like 1840s mathematician Ada Lovelace,now considered to be the world’s first computer programmer.

Do these tardy tributes make up for the fact that in the allegedly enlightened 2017, the Times’ obit gender mix was still a lopsided 80 percent men and 20 percent women?

No. But it’s a start.

The “Overlooked” project was developed by Times gender editor Jessica Bennett and Amisha Padnani, who joined the paper’s obituaries desk as a digital editor in 2017. While Padnani was researching an obituary for a woman in the tennis world, she came across a story about Mary Ewing Outerbridge, who was credited with introducing tennis to America. When Outerbridge died in 1886, her passing was not marked in the newspaper.

It’s been marked now. On March 8, in honor of International Women’s Day, the Times launched “Overlooked” with a collection of 15 obituaries of literary giants, civil-rights icons, and boundary-pushing artists, all of whom fell through the tribute cracks because they were women.

The paper will be adding new obits on a weekly basis, and it will expand to include people from other overlooked populations.

Posterity-wise, the good news is that many of these noteworthy women are being valued now. Reading-wise, the great news is that they were not just amazing women, but fascinating people. Their stories would be a total treat even if they were not also high in historical fiber.

There was Marsha P. Johnson, an activist, prostitute and drag performer in Greenwich Village during the turbulent pre- and post-Stonewall late 1960s and ’70s and into the Gay Pride-fueled ’80s. She was a devout Christian and an AIDS activist who was photographed by Andy Warhol and admired by the young transgender people for whom she was an advocate, role model and parental figure.

Johnson died in 1992 under murky circumstances, but the “Overlooked” obit is full of vibrant life.

You probably know of poet Sylvia Plath, whose short life and tragic death by suicide have been chronicled in many term papers and biographies. But the new, much-deserved obituary is a perfectly calibrated mix of biography, criticism (“I like to think she somehow helped to open up and legitimate female anger,” author and Plath expert Gail Crowther says), and pop-culture nuggets. (Plath was once name-checked on “The Simpsons.”)

And the stories keep rolling on. The cancer cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks without her permission became the most widely used human cell line in biology. Ida B. Wells did some of the earliest reporting on lynching, and she helped found the NAACP. The aforementioned Ada Lovelace — who died in 1852 — was so prescient about the potential of computers, the Defense Department named a programming language after her.

“Sun and moon have no light left, earth is dark,” poet and “Overlooked” subject Qiu Jin wrote in 1904. “Our women’s world is sunk so deep, who can help us?”

Through these tributes, the helping hands of our foremothers are reaching out with a grip that could throttle the patriarchy. I wouldn’t mind reading that obituary, either.